Stuff that gets you through the night...

Sometimes a kind word or fitting wavelength is all you need to get up and go on. Herein lie sketches on worthy things that may reach you in some random way. I'll never know their effect on you. I only know, it is for you, that I write them.

I had a bagful of fountain flowers from when I fell into the sleep of sleeps. A bagpiper passed me by and asked me for a dirge, so I sang him one, bid him good day, and pulled out a flower on display, but he ran away before I could slip it into his repertoire.

A girl of twenty showed me her lips because I refused to kiss her on her hips, and when that, too, I denied, she pulled all the petals of all my flowers and threw the stems on my face.

I said, "Thank you for this scorn and destruction - now I'll have to return to the fountain and bring you new blooms for the plucking.

The bagpiper had grown old and weary upon my return with the second bagful of fountain flowers. He asked me for a song of birth. I sang him one, bid him goodnight, and pulled out a flower for his pleasure. He stumbled toward me to grasp it from my hand, but dropped to the ground like a dead bird from the timber.

The girl all grey and seething with feud required that I be subdued and demanded the bagful of flowers. I flung them into the air and went back to the fountain where Nemesis, at the behest of Echo’s accusal, never fails to hand me daffodils. She hopes that I'll stare into the pool and become a fool like Narcissus.

Pipers, maidens, witches and goddesses, they come to my table at night. But with each failed purpose they count their hours, for their deaths must follow dawn.